Related papers: The exploration-exploitation paradigm for networke…
This PhD thesis is essentially the story of a scientific idea, from what it has blossomed, how it has grown, what it might become. My ambition in writing has been to produce an original, coherent and compact narrative. It begins (1) with a…
Spatially-embedded complex networks, such as nervous systems, the Internet and transportation networks, generally have non-trivial topological patterns of connections combined with nearly minimal wiring costs. However the growth rules…
The dynamics of complex systems generally include high-dimensional, non-stationary and non-linear behavior, all of which pose fundamental challenges to quantitative understanding. To address these difficulties we detail a new approach based…
The capacity of cells and organisms to respond to challenging conditions in a repeatable manner is limited by a finite repertoire of pre-evolved adaptive responses. Beyond this capacity, cells can use exploratory dynamics to cope with a…
The brain is one of the most studied and highly complex systems in the biological world. It is the information center behind all vertebrate and most invertebrate life, and thus has become a major focus in current research. While many of…
Finding a good compromise between the exploitation of known resources and the exploration of unknown, but potentially more profitable choices, is a general problem, which arises in many different scientific disciplines. We propose a…
It is now generally assumed that the heterogeneity of most networks in nature probably arises via preferential attachment of some sort. However, the origin of various other topological features, such as degree-degree correlations and…
How do we capture the breadth of behavior in animal movement, from rapid body twitches to aging? Using high-resolution videos of the nematode worm $C. elegans$, we show that a single dynamics connects posture-scale fluctuations with…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
We investigate how locomotory behavior is generated in the brain focusing on the paradigmatic connectome of nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) and on neuronal activity patterns that control forward locomotion. We map the neuronal…
C. elegans locomotion is composed of switches between forward and reversal states punctuated by turns. This locomotory capability is necessary for the nematode to move towards attractive stimuli, escape noxious chemicals, and explore its…
The neural dynamics of the nematode C. elegans are experimentally low-dimensional and correspond to discrete behavioral states, where previous modeling work has found neural proxies for some of these states. Experimental results further…
The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in different contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the essential dynamics of survival analysis,…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
A significantly under-explored area of evolutionary optimization in the literature is the study of optimization methodologies that can evolve along with the problems solved. Particularly, present evolutionary optimization approaches…
Control is essential to the functioning of any neural system. Indeed, under healthy conditions the brain must be able to continuously maintain a tight functional control between the system's inputs and outputs. One may therefore hypothesise…
Complex networks can often be decomposed into less complex sub-networks whose structures can give hints about the functional organization of the network as a whole. However, these structural motifs can only tell one part of the functional…
Recent whole-brain calcium imaging recordings of the nematode C. elegans have demonstrated that neural activity is dominated by dynamics on a low-dimensional manifold that can be clustered according to behavioral states. Despite progress in…
A central problem of neuroscience involves uncovering the principles governing the organization of nervous systems which ensure robustness in brain development. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans provides us with a model organism for…
Complex network theory provides a unifying framework for the study of structured dynamic systems. The current literature emphasizes a widely reported phenomenon of intermittent interaction among network vertices. In this paper, we introduce…